


Planetary Engineering

by roseveare



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-19 22:56:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7380817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseveare/pseuds/roseveare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avon always makes the logical decision, even when it comes to sacrificing one of their own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planetary Engineering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiderfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/gifts).



> The request was for Avon being a bastard. :)

Avon waved a finger at the blue-grey planet hovering on the screen. Other disc shapes were visible in the background of the viewer, although much smaller from this vantage, except for the sister planet that loomed, moon-sized in this view, just peeping over the horizon. "The mineral we're looking for is locally sourced on Aldebuudh III, though there are some deposits to be found on VII. However, VII is by far the more occupied by a Federation affiliated society, while III is virtually uninhabited... I think my reasoning stands for itself."

"Stomping through jungles?" Vila bemoaned, despite the fact he wasn't going. "That's always fantastic reasoning."

" _III_ and _VII_?" Tarrant demanded. "How many habitable planets are there in this star system?"

"Seventeen," Avon responded wryly. "Or fourteen planets and three moons. Fascinating, isn't it?"

"I didn't even think it was possible. The law of averages..."

"Exactly what I mean." He gave Tarrant a grin that showed teeth and watched the furrow in his brow deepen, wondering if the self-declared Space Captain would put the pieces together.

"A system of plenty." Dayna loped onto the flight deck and slapped Tarrant in the shoulder with the long barrel of the large firearm in her left hand, distracting him before the conversation had a chance. "You want to try out the powerful new gun or the _explosive_ new gun?"

"Ooh, the hard choices," Tarrant drawled, and turned into a grinning idiot composed mostly of hair and teeth as he reached to examine the offered weapons. 

"I'll stick with a pistol, thank you," Soolin said, not impolitely, shaking her head at Dayna but finding a small, private smile for the younger woman's enthusiasm when she thought no-one was looking. "I prefer a weapon my hand knows, and I could dismantle and fire in my sleep, rather than trade up to bigger and better."

Avon raised both hands, not without some amusement, as Dayna offered the weapon Tarrant hadn't chosen with her eyebrows raised in challenge. "I will also stick with the weapon I'm familiar with."

Dayna smiled smugly and holstered the gun on her own belt. As she looked back up, her eyes zeroed in on Vila. "Last chance. Sure you're not interested in swapping places?"

"Oh, I couldn't deprive you of the pleasure," Vila said quickly, with that earnest anxiety that knew she was joking but remained just that little unsure how far it might be pushed. "I _absolutely_ wish I was coming with you. _So_ disappointed to have drawn ship duty for this jaunt. But I'll console myself with knowing you'll have fun. Goodbye, now." He made a grab for the teleport controls, as if to get there before they changed their minds.

"Vila," Soolin started warningly as his hand touched the switch, her gun still mid-check in her hands.

Avon quickly grabbed the handle of the tool box he'd prepared, and tapped his fingers to his forehead to leave Vila an ironic salute as the warping of the teleport overtook the air around them. 

***

Untouched by the Federation it might be, and sparsely populated, but hardly untouched at all -- either now, or in the past. Dayna frowned as for the third time some sixth sense told her she was being watched, and she turned to catch a glimpse of a face ducking down behind foliage, and bright feathers on clothes that did not seem to be especially made with staying camouflaged while hunting in mind.

She wished now she'd brought a less lethal weapon. They had no proof the natives were as malicious as those she'd grown up with, but if they decided the _Scorpio_ crew were a threat anyway, they'd still have to fight them.

"Let's pretend we just don't see them, eh?" Tarrant said under his breath. "We don't need much of the rock Avon wants. Get in, get out, we might manage to be away from here before the problem comes to a head."

Dayna nodded quickly, though she was fairly sure the people already knew she'd seen them.

Avon seemed to be in his element -- at least, delighted and fascinated by the ruins they kept stumbling across in the undergrowth. Cue lots of grand explanations and overlong words Dayna could barely be bothered with. Avon had been in a good mood to begin with, today, which in the days since he'd murdered Dr Plaxton had become unusual and a little unnerving.

"You can see it quite clearly over there--" He sketched the shapes in the landscape with his hands; framed his fingers now in a triangle on the air as he leaned in over Soolin to illustrate from her view. "That whole hillside is one enormous buried structure. The regularity of the lines, the way they sit in the landscape... Arranged with astronomical precision according to this planet's moons and sister planet, and the star of this solar system... No doubt further astronomical features, too. The civilisation who occupied this place must have been at least as advanced as ancient humans. From the age of these ruins, they pre-dated the human expansion into space..."

"You're suggesting this was an _alien_ civilisation?" Soolin scoffed. She appeared to be moderately engaged by most of his explanations -- it bordered on flirting, from Avon, to Dayna's eyes, but then from Soolin she only saw vague interest for the subject matter coupled with intense disinterest for the man. At least, for any purposes other than maintaining a working relationship.

"Oh, we've met our share," Tarrant chipped in. 

"Cally--" Avon started, and then bit off. Dayna winced.

"What do you think Dorian's creature was?" she asked, in distraction.

"Someone's twisted science project," Soolin responded dryly. "And don't try to tell me otherwise. No-one knows its origin."

Avon recovered to assert, "Blake's crew on the _Liberator_ encountered aliens more than once. The _Liberator_ itself was beyond doubt a vessel of truly alien origin."

"Believe me, it's out there," Tarrant said.

"And usually unfriendly," Dayna added.

"I wonder what we'd find if we had time to dig into these mounds," Avon mused, although his mood had notably darkened. It picked up again a little as they passed another low wall, hidden mostly by the undergrowth, and he pulled on a glove to shift fronds aside, to trace fingers over the once-uniform face, now webbed by the marks left by creepers, that lay underneath. "Harder and stronger than ordinary rock. This was the upper surface of a much higher wall..." Dayna could see it was a clean edge, not crumbling. "Who knows how much lies buried under our feet?"

Dayna looked down, dubiously. She scratched her toe in the ground and cut a groove through only compacted mud. 

"Ah!" Avon exclaimed as they emerged from the thick of the trees onto the edge of a vast gulley, cut by a glittering river far below. In the cliff face opposite, the openings of old man-made tunnels could be seen. The original regularity of their shape was obvious despite the effects of time. Dayna wondered if they'd actually been bisected straight through by the work of the water over the rock, over the ages. "Perhaps someone has already done our work for us."

"Old mines?" Tarrant asked. He waved his hand over the gulf between themselves and the high openings to the tunnels. "All well and good, but do tell how we're going to get there?"

Avon tipped his head sarcastically. "Some fine-tuning of the teleport should achieve it, especially if we can find a likely ledge and Vila doesn't have to work through rock."

Dayna winced. " _Isn't_ there a way to just climb? I'd rather not end up trying to be in the same place as the cliff wall."

"There _is_ such a thing as being too much at one with nature," Soolin murmured in support.

"If someone felt like climbing, it would be more accurate to lock onto their teleport bracelet and take the positioning from there." Avon gave Tarrant a nasty grin. "Be my guest."

The glitter and sarcasm in Avon's eyes challenged the other man, but Dayna rolled her eyes and said, " _I'll_ do it." She leaned out over the cliff edge, taking a firm hold on the vegetation, and looked down. More tunnels, as she'd suspected, continued on their side of the gorge. Over to the right, she could see one relatively close to the top that she thought she could climb down to. 

She scrambled back upright. "This way. I think I can see a way down."

***

Not quite what they'd been expecting, the tunnels seemed clear and free of debris, and ultimately mined out. Avon tapped his fingers against a mineral vein in the wall, that had weathered or been carved out slightly proud of the rock around it. His instruments told him that it was close to what they needed, but it had one molecular bond too many to serve their purposes without a complicated conversion process. 

Evidently the same had been the case for the people who had originally mined from these tunnels. They had known enough to determine that, despite the near-identical visual appearance of the substances.

Soolin was standing at the opening back onto the chasm, and when he turned to wave the crew onward into the depths, she remarked, "Our friends seem agitated."

It took a moment to pick out the faces staring at them from the top of the other side of the ravine.

"Well, so long as we're over here and they're over there," Tarrant said. "Come on. Avon, did you bring a spare torch? Using my incendiary gun for illumination might prove a bit messy."

Dayna winced. "Probably better not to fire that in the tunnels at all."

" _Thank you_." Tarrant laid on the sarcasm, though whether for pointing out the obvious or persuading him to bring the experimental weapon was a factor that remained unknown.

Avon handed over the smaller torch from the toolkit -- to Soolin. " _She_ has a working weapon." 

Tarrant splayed both hands in an annoyed, helpless gesture.

"One at the front, one at the rear." Avon lifted his own torch and gun -- the torch was clipped to the top of the toolkit -- in illustration, and Soolin nodded and fell back. 

Avon made every effort to tune out the banality of Dayna and Tarrant's argument as they progressed lower through the tunnels. He had to keep his mind on any possible trace of what they'd come to find, as well as memorise the twists and turns of their route. There had certainly been more than one entrance to the tunnel system, but it was wise to be careful, in case they didn't stumble across a feasible exit route. They could not rely upon the teleport through this much thickness of rock. 

It wasn't particularly surprising that he noticed the anomaly before anyone else. He was in the lead, but chances were it _still_ wouldn't have been surprising -- Tarrant and Dayna were still exchanging snide commentary, although he had a growing respect for Soolin's calm observational skills.

He stopped and raised a hand to warn the overs, setting the tool box down with a bump so he could flick the torch off. "Soolin..."

The torch at the rear of their party clicked off instantly, leaving--

"Where is that glow coming from?" Dayna asked.

"Paying attention again?" Avon sighed.

"Well, Tarrant's an ungrateful--"

"Hush," Tarrant said. "The glow's fluctuating, but it's the wrong colour for any kind of fire. What is it and where is it coming from?"

"I suggest we find the source _quietly_ ," Avon said.

"He means you, Tarrant," Dayna said, but she silenced and didn't respond verbally to his mock-punch on her shoulder. Avon was aware a few minutes later that Soolin and Dayna had swapped places, though he missed the silently-made exchange, only realising after the fact that Dayna was carrying the smaller torch at the back.

They tracked the glow ever further downward. Avon was growing concerned about the number of junctions in the tunnels and deigned to mark the wall at the next intersection, as they took the brightest path.

They entered the back of a vast chamber with a... a whole wall composed of green-yellow _fire_ flickering at its far side. "It's beautiful..." Dayna whispered. "What is it? _Is_ it fire?"

Avon could only guess. "Unlike anything I've ever seen before, but if I could examine the instrumentation associated with it--"

"Doomed to an unromantic answer," Tarrant intoned. From the way Dayna smirked, it seemed they were friends again and the joke was on Avon.

"Should we take a closer look?" Soolin suggested, then added pointedly, "Is it anything to do with our mineral?"

"Unlikely," Avon said. Caution was advocated, especially... yes, especially now that three of the Aldebuudhan natives had appeared at ground level in the vast chamber, close to the greenish flame wall.

"Wait, what are they going to do?" Soolin asked in sharp alarm. Avon narrowed his eyes, studying the scene. It was true that the man in the centre, held between the other two, looked coerced.

"Something unfriendly," Dayna said. "I told you."

"These people are clearly from Earth stock," Tarrant corrected. "Some lost early-colony ship, no doubt. Hardly the original inhabitants."

Soolin's gun was in her hand like lightning, but she held herself, mouth open in shock, and visibly forced herself to do nothing as the man in the centre was hurled into the flame wall. A ripple effect spread out from where the person had gone in, his matter darkening and contaminating the colours for a moment before all trace disappeared completely.

Dayna drew a sharp breath. Then a cry rang up, picked up by more and more voices. "Where is--?" She shifted, looking all around in helpless fright at the sudden uproar. It sounded like a hundred voices were in the room with them, but only the two people by the flame wall were in sight.

Avon realised with a sinking feeling that from where they were on a ledge high up in the back of the chamber, the angle of the slope in front of them obscured a hidden recess... a _pit_... that must be filled with onlookers. From the vantage of the pit, the area of the flame wall was a stage. The audience who had been silent while the man was walked in, had now picked up an enthusiastic chant in favour of the... sacrifice?

Tarrant swallowed hard enough to make his throat jump visibly. "Let's get _out_ of here."

Of course, that was when one of the two Aldebuudhans on the stage pointed and shouted, the acoustics carrying his voice above the furore, finger jabbing unerringly toward the _Scorpio_ crew at the rear of the chamber.

***

Tarrant didn't think much of bows and arrows. Even less, now. He clamped his hand over where the arrow had gone through his upper arm, trying not to let it shift, and grit his teeth.

"You know, I do wish I had a _gun_ I could actually _use_ ," he said to Dayna.

"Shush, now... You know Soolin and I will protect you," she panted back. 

"Because you're doing _such_ a good job of that!"

They were being herded. The concentration of arrows were fired into the mouth of the passageway that would have been their escape, making it impossible to head in that direction. Dayna experienced another near-miss as she tried, and swore and ducked back. They had no choice but to draw toward the front of the chamber and the increasingly brilliant, flickering green-yellow light from the flame-wall. They could see now the mass of the people, crowded in a sunken recess in the chamber floor, though the ones who were shouting had largely jumped up on the 'stage' to an elevated position. There was no cover from the fire, but it seemed that the Aldebuudhans didn't want to kill them so long as they were going in the right direction.

\--Right direction being toward the wall that disintegrated people in what was clearly their barbaric little local ritual sacrifice, thought Tarrant bitterly.

" _Into the Veil! Into the Veil!_ " Tarrant heard them picking up the chant to back up his worst pessimistic fears. " _Into the Veil of Death_!"

"'Veil of Death'?" he tossed across the intervening space to Dayna and Avon, in an appropriate tone of complaint. 

"It disintegrates people!" Dayna returned. "What else would you call it?"

"Oh, I don't know. The 'shiny green light-wall of love' has its own folksy ring, plus the advantage of giving people a nice false sense of security..." Babbling was at least a distraction from his notable _lack of gun_ and the agony in his arm. Which had an arrow through it.

Tarrant noticed how Avon's eyes were fixed on the traces of whatever mechanisms lay behind the light wall's function, inset in the floor of the raised area and the two sides of the illuminated, flickering surface. 

"I have an idea," Avon said slowly. Tarrant could see the green-yellow flames reflecting in his eyes. The result was... actually rather fittingly demonic. 

"So do I," he returned. "If you're not going to use your own gun, hand it over!" He held his hand out, fingers wiggling.

Avon glowered back and aimed a deliberate single shot to knock the bow out of a blue-and-yellow-feathered man's hands. Then he raised his hands and his voice. "Hold! Please!" His crisp tones gave the lie to the nominal plea. "We'll do what you want. We'll go toward the... the _veil_." He took several steps uncontested by shots as the Aldebuudhans held and watched warily. "You see? Here we are." He gestured for the others to follow him quickly. He was doing a grand old job of maintaining the confident front, complete with manic grin, but Tarrant could see him sweating. "We understand now. We came in through your tunnels. We weren't supposed to trespass there, were we? That was our mistake."

Tarrant and Dayna clambered on the stage, helping each other. Avon clamped a hand on Soolin's arm to haul her up -- her focus was still the weapon held in her other hand, glaring dangerously at the Aldebuudhans down its sights.

"We're sorry," Dayna tried. At least she was better at apologies than Avon. "We didn't trespass on purpose. We were just looking for a type of rock, that we thought we could find here, under the ground. We didn't mean any harm. All right?"

"Throw them into the Veil of Death!" a voice rang out anew.

"Aw, no, _no_ Veil of Death..." Tarrant cajoled. "You can recognise an honest mistake..." Sideways he hissed, "Whatever that _plan_ of yours is, Avon--"

Avon's white teeth were terrifying. His eyes put the grim lie to his grin, making it something awful. His eyes slid around their little party, narrowed and calculating. "Alright," he said softly.

Then he bypassed Tarrant on his left side and shoved hard against Soolin's shoulder. Her face twisted in a frantic, disbelieving expression as she overbalanced, and the next moment she fell -- without a cry -- through the Veil of Death. There was that flicker of material being disintegrated and puffing outwards through the flames, forming a brief halo of darker matter like a ripple, then she was completely gone.

"We have sacrificed!" Avon yelled, voice cracking, pointing at the space where Soolin had been as Tarrant, and Dayna beside him, froze, stunned. "Chosen from among our own number to appease for our transgression! Witness!"

Tarrant was _just_ in time to grab Dayna in both arms, groaning as the arrow twisted, and managed to stop her hurling herself at Avon to -- well, push him through the flames after Soolin would be his best guess.

The Aldebuudhans had stopped, though. Tarrant, panting, fighting against Dayna and agony as his head reeled, couldn't deny that Avon had got a reaction.

One of the women, with no markings or any greater finery to distinguish her as such, nonetheless stepped forward to speak like a leader. "Take them. He's right. Of their own hand. The Veil is appeased for now. We can take our time to decide what to do with the strangers."

***

"You really are a bastard, Avon," Tarrant drawled, although his head was lolling slightly on his neck and his eyes were feverish. Any excesses in his behaviour might, therefore, be put down to the arrow wound in his arm. But Avon wasn't especially interested in listening to the ranting of his emotional judgements either way. It was also just as likely he was trying to recapture face in front of both of them for squealing quite so loudly when the Aldebuudhan doctor -- to use the term very loosely -- had snapped the arrow and dragged its two halves out of his arm. "I know Soolin hasn't been with us very long, but that didn't make her disposable."

"Even in exchange for all our lives?" Avon hazarded wearily. He made a sour tug at the chain on his left wrist, which seemed the looser of the two. It was clearly too much to hope he could spend a little less time chained up in dank cells while, in theory, exploring the universe. "It seemed evident to me they meant to kill _all_ of us."

"When I get out of these chains, you'd better hope you're already free to start running, and that you've been exercising a hell of a lot more than I think you have, because _I'm_ going to kill _you_ ," Dayna seethed, in a low growl of a voice that was a perfect match to the one she usually saved for Servalan.

Avon frowned and pressed his lips tighter. It was, he thought, going to be a long, uncomfortable wait in this cell, for however long they were to be stuck here. The chain was secure and the solid iron was emphatically unmoved by his technical expertise. "One of these rare occasions I wish I'd brought Vila," he commented dryly, changing the subject as he jangled the chains in illustration. 

"Why? So you could kill him _instead_?" Dayna demanded. Her eyes were hot with rage. Avon had no doubt that she meant the death threats. A pity: he had known Dayna for what amounted to a long time now, in an uncertain world. But he wasn't prepared to sit and provide lectures on where his compatriots' logic and reasoning abilities fell down. 

"Only... you wouldn't want to kill _Vila_ , would you?" Tarrant picked up, bitterly, spitting the words across the intervening space from his position chained to the opposite wall. "He's a wretched coward, but he's so _useful_ to you." Avon rather thought he could count himself lucky that Tarrant and Dayna had been subdued and placed in chains sufficiently far away from him as quickly as they had. "Are we all disposable counters and equations to you, now, like Plaxton? Should Dayna and I be flattered that you bypassed us to pick Soolin?"

Avon slid his eyes disparagingly over them in turn and deemed, "Not particularly." His attention slid down further to the rag around Tarrant's arm. The blood looked copious. "You should probably avoid agitating yourself unnecessarily."

Nothing a PAD couldn't fix, so long as they weren't left hanging here _too_ long, he judged. If the arrow had hit a major artery, Tarrant would have been dead already. 

*

In a matter of the next six or eight hours -- he had no way to definitively be sure of the time -- Avon was proved typically correct. It was an _exceptionally_ tedious stretch of time spent in their cell. He managed to sleep, disposing of a few hours. He awoke to Dayna trying to blast her arm off -- Or at least, she had successfully detached one end of her right wrist chain from the wall with the small amount of explosive she'd had hidden, threaded into her clothing. And she claimed her fingers weren't broken, only scuffed and bruised. 

Even able to use both hands, she couldn't shift the remaining chain from the wall, or her wrist from the chain. She only made her wrist bleed. For Avon, expressing concern, she still had nothing but scorn. 

Perhaps he should have chosen Dayna, Avon reflected, academically. She was always too emotional. But she was also resourceful. 

He could have chosen Tarrant. Tarrant had been closer... and injured, and unarmed. But Tarrant was a _pilot_...

Too many variables. He hoped he hadn't made the wrong choice, or miscalculated completely. Either way, he suspected that he was unlikely to ever be _forgiven_ for this.

"Dayna..." Avon began warningly.

"I don't want to _know_ , Avon," she said with contempt. "Soolin was one of us. I liked her. I thought _you_ liked her. I can't believe you'd just--"

"--I hear the guard coming back," he finished, forcefully talking over her; giving a dour tip of his head toward her loose chain.

*

The Aldebuudhans marched them down a familiar course of tunnels to a familiar chamber.

 _Well_ , Avon reflected, with a feeling of impending irony, _It seems that's one last ditch gamble that didn't quite work_.

The guards parted to allow the unmarked female leader from before to come , through. The crowds in the pit were daunting from this perspective, and they were holding themselves in uncanny silence. It was rather worse that they were so silent, Avon thought, academically. Uncanny. He'd grown used to the Federation's good old-fashioned baying for blood.

"It has been decided," the leader said. "For your trespass in the sacred inner chambers... even though we acknowledge your respectful efforts to atone for your crime... lest the Veil still hungers for all of you, you must follow your sacrifice."

Avon tried very hard not to laugh. Well... chances were fifty-fifty, he'd been thinking, and if there was nothing waiting beyond the veil... He was about to find out for himself. "We will go," he said, calmly, almost cheerfully. He bored his gaze into Dayna's and Tarrant's, willing them to pick up the hint. It was probably a wasted effort. Perfectly normal, for anything concerning Tarrant and subtlety. Probably with Dayna, too, today.

"You've got to be joking," Dayna exclaimed. He could see her tensing herself for a last-ditch fight.

"What good would it do to die, uselessly, here?" Avon returned. "We might as well... step through the veil and meet the Gods on the other side."

" _Just one moment_!" The sharp, female voice reverberated around the whole chamber.

"What--?" Dayna spun on her heel. Avon already knew what he had heard and was seeing.

A group of people croded the entrance to the chamber. The Aldebuudhans closest to them had fallen onto hands and knees.

Soolin, at the head of the group, taking in the size of her audience, pulled herself straighter and taller. She raised her hands above her head and her voice rose all the louder. "People of Aldebuudh III, I bring back your dead, returned to life!" Her mouth twisted into a scowl, and she added, ominously, "Please be kinder to them this time..." She waited several moments before, almost in afterthought, she indicated the _Scorpio_ crew -- her pointing hand seemed to zero in on Avon, particularly, he noted, not without some sense of unease. "I'll take back my own."

***

There were waste piles lining the sides of the tunnels near the ground-level entrance the Aldebuudhans used. Soolin noticed that Avon wasn't too rattled to sift through them quickly and pocket a handful of loose rubble with a triumphant smirk.

Bastard.

The Federation had become so used to random natives from Aldebuudh III turning up on VII that they had created an internment facility at the other end of the misnamed 'Veil of Death' -- actually some kind of fixed two-location transported for bulk goods -- where it stored the people until it had sufficient numbers to ship off for illegal sale to the slave trade of the fringe planets.

"They were hardly expecting a woman with a ready gun to show up," she said, finishing her story under her breath.

"You could have waited for us on the other side," Tarrant pointed out.

"I couldn't be sure they'd try to dispose of you the same way. They _might_ have just shot you." She frowned. "Besides, _Scorpio_ isn't within teleport range of Aldebuudh VII. And I certainly wasn't allowing them to ship you right back to where I'd come from after all that effort to get back to Aldebuudh III with sixteen technology-shy peoplein tow." She raked her gaze over them as they emerged from the tunnels into the undergrowth and the canopy-filtered sunlight. "Ready for teleport?"

Avon rolled his eyes and lifted his wrist to his jaw. "Vila, teleport now."

Soolin had been satisfied to see Tarrant and Dayna's hostility toward their nominal leader on her behalf, but the matter was a long way from fully addressed. As the _Scorpio's_ flight deck coalesced around them, she lifted her gun. " _Avon_..."

In the same instant, Dayna lunged with her fist raised and Tarrant grabbed onto her trailing arm and held her back. Soolin wasn't sure if he was trying to help Avon or just to keep Dayna out of the way of her own shot.

"Holy--!" Vila made a false start to scramble up, and then fell back and turned for the tumbler of Soma on the console instead. "What _happened_?!"

"I should kill you now," Soolin said, to Avon, ignoring Vila, ignoring everything else in the world. Her fingers stroked the gun.

Avon started talking, quickly and loudly, with glacial calm. "The technology left on Aldebuudh III is exceptional. What else could we expect, from an advanced race who left us such a clearly _engineered_ star system. _Seventeen_ worlds, with a perfect distributions of mineral wealth and environments to each planet. They didn't make veils of light that obliterated people," he finished with disgust. "They could have used a large rock and considerably less effort for that. No. The cavity in the floor for the conveyor, the engineering... Even without understanding the method, it was clear that _this_ was a massive one-way system of transportation, to deliver the mineral wealth mined on Aldebuudh III to the centre of the empire..." He inclined his head cagily to Soolin. "Which _was_ the case."

Dayna narrowed her eyes and her face soured all the more at him. "We're supposed to be impressed by your cleverness? You couldn't know for sure it wouldn't kill her. There was a _significant_ chance it would. That was an _unacceptable risk_." She did put down her fist, though.

"A risk that played out," Soolin allowed, and slowly lowered then holstered her gun. "Very well. I'll let you have this one. But if it happens again, all bets are off." She glared at him a moment longer, delivering the forceful message, _Screw around with the other three if you will, but one more strike and_ Iwill _shoot you_.

Avon tipped a shoulder. "It was necessary." 

Soolin grimaced. "We also need to get out of here. Now. I may have attracted a little attention leaving Aldebuudh VII."

"Yes. Come on." Tarrant cajoled Dayna back, though she wasn't resisting so much now. "You can sulk at him as easily in deep space, although honestly I don't know why you're still surprised." Disgust lined his voice, resigned and absolute. "After Plaxton." Tarrant darted a crumpled smile at Dayna in an attempt at consolation, and made a transparent attempt to lighten the mood and his tone. "Maybe Vila could come up with some ideas for a chemical revenge."

"Oh, no." Vila raised his hands, surrendering any responsibility. "I don't even know what happened! I'm no part of this!"

***

Soolin hung back as soon as they were safely out of the system and able to set _Scorpio_ to drift, pressurising the rest of the ship properly again. The crew retreated to get cleaned up, and in Tarrant's case to get necessary medical attention, but Avon volunteered to keep watch on the flight deck. " _Trying to score forgiveness points_ ," Dayna had charmingly accused as she scowled at him, but it was only logical to stay out of their way after such a shake-up, and allow things to calm down.

"You still want a shot?" he asked Soolin when he saw that she was purposely lingering.

She shrugged. Her face was bleak and cold, and largely unreadable, but then it often was. "I noticed that you didn't jump into the Veil yourself. Or risk our vaunted Space Captain _pilot_ , who would have had a significantly easier time _getting back here_ , I should mention: I had to kidnap mine."

Avon lifted a shoulder minimally. "Any number of things might have happened. The Veil might not have worked properly anymore. The destination could have been based on a fixed orbit co-ordinate rather than a targeted secondary location, and shifted to space or the centre of the planet in the aeons in between. The receiver might not have worked, leaving the people sent through it in a limbo, never emerging the other end. Or... there could have been a ready dozen Federation guards stationed on the other end." 

"Not a _dozen_ ," Soolin said with a trace of apology for the lack of drama, still fingering her gun. "Two very bored armed men. And I'm very fast. They never stood a chance."

"The calculation extended both ways," Avon said.

She laughed at him, a sharp and short bark. "Alright. They're yours, I'm not. I'm very conscious of that choice. But, Avon..." Her voice lowered to a purr. "Do recognise that betrayal is a way of life where I come from. The _extraordinary_ part is that here I am, still not killing you." 

He nodded and let a grim smile stretch his face. Sobering indeed. Yet they were _all_ of them still alive, the purpose of the gamble served. "Understood."

END


End file.
